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Interesting, although a lot of the details clearly weren't meant to stand up to close analysis -- like the part on the far right with star system names superimposed on a satellite photo of the San Francisco Bay Area, or anachronistic references to "transwarp network" and "Orgainian [sic] Peace Treaty."

I always found the anachronistic bits of "name-dropping" in pieces of NuTrek (whether in the movies or the comics) to be the most irritating part of their attempts to "cater" to fans. It all smacks of superficial attempts to satisfy fans without actually looking into whether or not they made sense in the context of the thing they were talking about.

There are other differences between Prime Trek's depiction of warp drive vs. Abramsverse Trek. In the Abramsverse, the implication seems to be that ships at warp are flying sensor-blind to what's happening in normal space -- hence the Enterprise leaving warp and flying right into the debris field in ST09, for instance. And

Khan's

line in STID about Kirk being wrong in thinking that going to warp means the Enterprise is safe from weapons fire seems to imply that it's virtually unheard of for ships at warp to be able to fire weapons at one-another. So all of this does seem to imply that Abramsverse warp drive works on different principles than Prime Trek's.

^Ah, but warp drive in the Prime universe has been portrayed in various different ways. In "The Cage" it was called "time warp" and was depicted as making the ship turn transparent. In TOS it didn't seem to look any different from impulse travel, but then in TMP it became something distinct from normal space, entered with a bang and characterized by multicolored streaks of light -- a precedent which later productions followed in their own varying ways.

Yeah, but those are differences in visual effects, not how the ship interacts with the outside universe.

So who's to say how warp drive worked in the late 2250s in the Prime universe? We have insufficient evidence to rule anything out.

Well, that's why I phrased it as "seems to," not, "definitely is different."

I always found the anachronistic bits of "name-dropping" in pieces of NuTrek (whether in the movies or the comics) to be the most irritating part of their attempts to "cater" to fans. It all smacks of superficial attempts to satisfy fans without actually looking into whether or not they made sense in the context of the thing they were talking about.

Or maybe just to satisfy themselves. Don't forget, Orci and Lindelof are mega-Trekkies. They probably understand the references as well as any fan in the audience does. And John Eaves, who was a production illustrator on DS9, ENT, TFF, and all the TNG movies (and designed the E-E), is also an illustrator on the Abrams films. No idea if he had a hand in that news-wall graphic, though.

Sci wrote:

Yeah, but those are differences in visual effects, not how the ship interacts with the outside universe.

I disagree. The visual effects were just part of it; there were differences in the underlying assumptions as well. The name "time warp" suggests a different idea about how it worked, and TMP's introduction of the visual suggestion of a different "warp space" that the ship entered and existed, a precedent followed by later productions, is distinctly different from TOS's approach that seemed to treat warp drive as just going really fast.

And thanks to The Making of ST:TMP and its reproduction of Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer's technical memo on warp drive, we know for a fact that TMP's warp drive was based on different operating assumptions from TOS's, ones more firmly grounded in relativistic physics (and coming remarkably close to the theoretical warp-drive model Miguel Alcubierre proposed 16 years later). Puttkamer was the first person to codify the idea that a Trek-universe starship traveled in "subspace" -- though he defined the term to mean the spacetime pocket the ship occupied (what Alcubierre and Sternbach/Okuda both call a warp bubble), rather than a hyperspace-like dimension as it was portrayed in TNG and after. In TOS, the term "subspace" was used only for radio.

For that matter, I don't think we ever saw ships in the TOS movies engaged in combat at warp, so we don't know that it was possible with the technology they were using at that time. We assume it was because that's what we're used to, but we have no proof.

For that matter, I don't think we ever saw ships in the TOS movies engaged in combat at warp, so we don't know that it was possible with the technology they were using at that time. We assume it was because that's what we're used to, but we have no proof.

I was about to declare that there is warp-speed combat in "Errand of Mercy," but rechecking the transcript, the Enterprise is attacked by the Klingons after stopping to decode a Starfleet message, before setting course for Organia. Almost as if the Klingons were waiting for them to drop out of warp!

^On the other hand, there's "Balance of Terror," where the Enterprise retreated at "emergency warp speed" from the Romulan plasma bolt that was also traveling at warp speed somehow. That suggests that the type of warp drive used during TOS did allow direct interaction/combat. Which is why I only said that the TOS movies don't show warp combat.

I've clicked on the link several times before I posted it and several times afterwards and had no problems like that with it, and I conduct regular scans of my computer...far as I know it's clean. So not sure what happened.

Anyway. Looking forward to the book. Forgot that Geoffery Mandel was working on the maps as well.

^On the other hand, there's "Balance of Terror," where the Enterprise retreated at "emergency warp speed" from the Romulan plasma bolt that was also traveling at warp speed somehow. That suggests that the type of warp drive used during TOS did allow direct interaction/combat. Which is why I only said that the TOS movies don't show warp combat.

Wasn't the Orion ship in "Journey to Babel" making attack runs on the Enterprise at warp speed as well?

For the movie era, the only example I can think of is the Excelsior being struck by Klingon torpedoes during "Flashback" (VGR).

Wasn't the Orion ship in "Journey to Babel" making attack runs on the Enterprise at warp speed as well?

Yes. There was a fair bit of warp speed combat in TOS... in The Ultimate Computer, M-5 always accelerated to warp 4 before beginning its attack runs, IIRC. But Christopher mentioned he was specifically referencing a dearth of warp combat in the movies.

It's not combat, per se, but the Enterprise did fire torpedoes at warp against the asteroid in TMP. (And Kirk originally ordered phasers, so presumably he didn't see an issue with firing them at warp either.) Obviously an asteroid wouldn't have warp drive itself, but I'm not clear on whether it was travelling at superluminal velocity due to being stuck in the wormhole or something. But at any rate, if they can attack an asteroid at warp, presumably they can also attack a ship at warp using TMP-era tech. I just don't know if there's any limiting conditions, eg- target must be FTL, target must be sublight, etc...

But at any rate, if they can attack an asteroid at warp, presumably they can also attack a ship at warp using TMP-era tech.

That doesn't follow. A wormhole is basically a tunnel in spacetime; both the ship and the asteroid were travelling through the same tunnel, the same distortion. But two different ships at warp are in two separate distortions, warp bubbles separated by an expanse of normal, flat space where the speed of light applies. By all rights, it should always be impossible for two ships to fight at warp. Or rather, the leading ship should always have an insurmountable advantage, because it could fire a weapon backward through normal space and have it basically function as a mine which the trailing ship would run into, while the trailing ship would be unable to do anything at all to the lead ship.

I seem to remember some old books saying that only torpedoes could be used in warp combat because they had mini-warp engines. But too many shows by this point have shown ships fighting at warp with phasers, which makes no damn sense. I've thrown in some handwaves in my novels about ships needing to "synchronize warp fields" to fight with phasers, and I implicitly assume they're coming close enough to each other to merge their fields, but it's essentially nonsense.

My biggest question and concern about Stellar Cartography is this: will it present any new information aside from (I assume) a few star names from the last couple of seasons of Enterprise? Or is it essentially just Star Charts repackaged in a different format?

That's going to be the biggest determining factor in whether or not I buy it.

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